The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

TRUMAN, S.E., HACKETT, A., PAHL, K., MCLEAN DAVIES, L. and ESCOTT, Hugh (2020). The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices. Reading Research Quarterly.

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Abstract

© 2020 The Authors. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Literacy Association The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution-focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Education; 1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy; 1701 Psychology
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.306
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	03 Apr 2020 15:12
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 01:17
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26092

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